Coolerbooks.com gets 1M Books from Google Scans

(AP) -- Interead, a British company that sells the COOL-ER e-book reader, is adding more than 1 million free public-domain books to its online bookstore. The texts are available from Google Inc. through its book-scanning project.

However, the online store won't be able to show half of the books outside the U.S. because of copyright restrictions, Interead said.

Interead has been selling its $249 entry to the still small but fast-growing e-book reader market since May. Its online store, Coolerbooks.com, has been offering about 330,000 books for sale in different formats.

The COOL-ER Reader, which looks a bit like a distorted iPod Nano, comes in a variety of bright hues and sports a 6-inch e-ink screen that displays text in eight shades of gray. It has 1 gigabyte of memory for storing books and a card slot for adding more. Users can download books to their computers, then load them to a connected COOL-ER reader.

Interead competitor Sony Corp. also offers a million free books at its eBook Store from Google Books, along with 100,000 other titles. Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle Store, which houses books that can be downloaded to its Kindle reader, includes about 350,000 titles.